Category: Contract Lifecycle Management

Spend Reduction in COVID: How Contract Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Legal Management Solutions Contain Costs

Posted on June 25, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

 In the first blog post of this three-part series on process efficiency and collaboration during COVID-19, we addressed the types of tools and tactics that legal departments are considering when building their solutions. In the second blog post, we explored how automation supports remote working and efficiencies. In this final blog post of the series, we focus on ROIs for tools such as enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management.   

Cost containment is urgently becoming a top priority for many companies during these challenging times. The technology that enables it will transform the ever-evolving business landscape and provide a lasting impact. General counsel, in-house counsel and other corporate legal professionals have a viable path to support their companies through the strategic adoption of technology.

An essential component of containing costs is addressing efficiency. An IDC survey found that businesses can lose 20-30 percent of revenue each year based on inefficiencies such as redundant processes, outdated or siloed technologies and bottlenecks. Addressing that deficiency alone will streamline operations for a corporate legal department and curb expenses.

The legal department can contribute to containing costs for their corporations through the adoption of technologies that offer automation and process efficiency.

Operational Efficiencies with Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)

ELM solutions provide valuable automation to corporate legal departments looking to examine their spend. A McKinsey research report cited that business automation can save up to 60% of occupations almost one-third of their time – allowing employees to focus on more impactful contributions in support of their company.

ELM solutions offer wide-spread control of all the facets of a legal function through process streamlining and accessible metrics. They’re exceptionally agile and cover a wide range of tasks that often fall under corporate counsel’s purview including contract management, NDA creation and distribution, legal holds and legal service requests. In terms of hard cost reduction, ELM solutions have multi-year savings potential meaning your legal team can perpetually maintain lower spend.

ELM savings: The International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM) estimates that ELM can deliver 5-12% in savings each year. Onit customers have said they save between 10-50% on legal spend alone.

Agreement Automation with Contract Lifecycle Management  

Contract review and assembly can chip away at your day – primarily if it relies on ineffective technologies or processes. CLM solutions provide the basis for standardized processes that allow legal departments to capture and analyze related data, as well as a centralized location for all documents and files. They offer an intuitive dashboard that allows counsel to easily create or review contracts and mitigate risks by having fewer contractual exceptions.

CLM savings: Onit clients report that CLM solutions have helped their legal departments reduce their time spent in the contracting process by nearly 20%. Likewise, IACCM reports that CLM systems can save more than 9% annually.

Data-Driven Departments Set Themselves Up for Success

Lawyers everywhere know spend is tricky regardless of how the economy is doing. However, more than ever, legal departments must drive efficiencies with their spend data.  For corporate counsel and legal ops professionals trying their best to exert more control over their departmental spend, we think you’ll find our whitepaper titled Driving Savings, Process Efficiency and Collaboration in the Legal Department in a Post-COVID-19 Environment quite helpful.

Determine your Potential Savings

 Ready to explore your ELM and CLM ROI potential? Onit offers a suite of savings calculators built to help justify technology spend amid the recent market uncertainty from the global crisis. They use a combination of metrics and industry data to give insight into what these solutions can do for your business, including quantifying potential benefits and analyzing long-term effects of potential investments.

You can request a savings analysis here.

How to Automate ReviewAI for Increased Legal Team Efficiency

Posted on June 24, 2020 by - Artificial Intelligence, Contract Lifecycle Management

It’s no secret that legal teams are notoriously slow in adopting new technologies like contract automation. The work is far from digitalized — most lawyers print, read and annotate hard copies of legal documents (hence the origins of the phrase “redlining contracts”) — and make their final edits within Microsoft Word as the only electronic step in the process.

Without effective contract management tools, the contract review process remains slow, requires enormous attention to detail and is prone to costly errors.

Consider the case of a junior professional reviewing a contract that requires more than a few changes.

While reviewing modifications that seem reasonable, but do not fit the corporate standards, the contract professional needs to send the revised agreement to a more senior lawyer for legal review and approval. While this is happening, the line of business manager is emailing the contract team, asking for a status update. Countless emails are sent back and forth while multiple business days are lost.

This bottleneck directly impacts a company’s ability to reach favorable contract outcomes, and ultimately impacts the bottom line.

Many new positions within legal departments are created to handle contracts and legal compliance, yet most legal departments still confront a persistent headcount shortage. Instead of continuing to hire more and more lawyers, legal departments need a new AI solution that delivers significant productivity gains, allowing lawyers to utilize their skills, experience and talent on higher-value business objectives.

Enter a Word Add-in and legal document automation software that allows lawyers to dramatically streamline many activities typical of legal work, such as redlining contracts, comparing clauses to corporate standards, and ensuring that fine details comply with corporate policy.

In a comprehensive study, Onit examined the impact of its legal AI assistant, ReviewAI, on the productivity of in-house lawyers during routine contract review and compliance activities.

The study required lawyers to review contracts across three contract types – supply, service and confidentiality – and perform five tasks – summary, analysis, comparison, repapering and drafting. Together, these tasks reflect the day-to-day activities of compliance checking, standard reviews and contract drafting, all of which are typical of the contract management role.

For each contract, participants had to validate 285 items against corporate standards as accurately and quickly as possible. The participants performed the exercise manually for half of the study, referring to the company clause bank precedents as needed. For the other half of the study, participants were required to install, learn and use ReviewAI to enable contract automation.

The impact of legal AI on the contract management lifecycle included:

  • Lawyers who were new users were 51.5% more productive when using ReviewAI than when working manually, and that productivity increased the more proficient they became with the contract management tool.
  • It took 34% less time for lawyers to perform their day-to-day work. That translates to a team of 19 lawyers being able to do the work of 28, reducing cost to process each contract from $592 to $395.50 on average.
  • The manager of the contracts team, a senior lawyer with significant legal and business experience, was able to reallocate 15% of his time to higher-value activities.

For a typical legal department, utilizing ReviewAI enables lower costs, increased knowledge retention and improved contract quality, delivering an estimated 45x multiple on the cost of the ReviewAI investment.

To see ReviewAI in action and learn more about the return on investment it can bring to your legal team, book a demo and we’ll show you the ropes.

You can also read the full-length whitepaper for more info on our study.

Onit Releases New COVID-19 Contract and Meeting Applications for Free!

Posted on April 27, 2020 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

As we continue to face this ever-changing environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have made it our mission at Onit to help organizations the best way we know how. By providing free business continuity software applications that help organizations manage their remote workforce, financial impacts, business processes, and company risk. We feel that it is our responsibility as an enterprise software vendor to not only take care of our customers but to do our part in helping every type of business of every size.

I am pleased to announce that we are launching two new free Business Continuity Apps, Contract Compliance Issue Tracking, and Weekly Meeting Tracker.
 

Contract Compliance App

Contract Compliance Issue Tracking App

Contract Compliance Issue Tracking App provides a mechanism for companies to log and manage issues reported by (inbound) or reported to (outbound) external parties that impact the ability to deliver on a contract. This includes, but is not limited to, force majeure claims. This App also:

  • Enables employees to notify the legal department quickly of problems with contract compliance and what obligations may not be able to be met
  • Provides visibility into the types of compliance issues that have been reported based on the level of risk
  • Sets rules for automatically notifying legal, finance, and operations reviewers
Weekly Meeting Tracker App

Weekly Meeting Tracker App

Weekly Meeting Tracker Application enables managers and leadership to quickly establish a framework for offsite team communications, including managing agendas and follow-ups for standup meetings and aggregating updates for management reporting. This Apps also:

  • Manages meetings and provide visibility to their outcomes
  • Adds meetings details and generates team email notifications to communicate meeting descriptions, attendees, topics, and post-meeting outcomes
  • Sends reminders to have updates and discussion topics provided by team members before meetings to ensure meetings are productive and efficient

We have designed these Business Continuity Apps with three key principles in mind, free, simple, and standard. As stated earlier, we are here to help and when we say free, we mean FREE! We are able to do this by engineering these Apps as simple and as standard as possible so that they can be used out of the box across a variety of industries, departments, and use cases.

Even though these Apps are out of the box, they are still built upon our innovative workflow platform. Meaning they share the same infrastructure, security, and performance as all of our industry-leading enterprise-class software. Another benefit of the cloud-based Business Continuity Apps is that they are accessible on any modern web-browser, device, and to an unlimited of users.

For more information on our Business Continuity Apps for COVID-19 please visit us online.

Watch Onit and Pearson’s Webinar: A Platform Approach to Contract Lifecycle Management

Posted on April 13, 2020 by - Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

Last week we hosted a webinar with Pearson about the changing times and how Pearson has saved more than 35% using contract lifecycle management technology. You can view the recording today. The webinar, A Platform Approach to Contract Lifecycle Management, was part of our new Lean into LegalOps online learning initiative and included a comprehensive demo of Pearson’s contract lifecycle management (CLM) system.

Amanda Sengbusch, Senior Project Manager at Pearson, started the session with an overview of what Pearson does on a global scale. She also noted the efforts Pearson has undertaken to contribute during the current COVID-19 crisis. Matt DenOuden, Vice President of Global Sales at Onit, then offered some insight into Onit’s new online learning initiative, Lean into LegalOps, and our business continuity Apps.

In setting the stage for Amanda’s demo, Charmel Rhyne, CLM Sales Director at Onit, explained Onit’s contract lifecycle management solution and how it adds value, providing end-to-end automation of the entire contract management process. She also explained the many benefits of using contract lifecycle management technology, such as reducing the hours spent on contracts by 20%, automating renewal increases with an average of 5% per contract, saving 9% annually with good contracting, and reducing the average sales cycle by 24%.

Amanda then provided some background on how Pearson began their journey to reduce legal spend in 2017. In response, their legal department created the Transaction Services Center (TSC), which facilitates high volume, low risk standard agreements, allowing internal counsel to focus on more complex agreements and more time to support the business. Onit provided the contract lifecycle management solution used by the TSC, consisting of four main features: legal service requests, contract review and approval, contract database and legal advisory requests. Amanda emphasized that the game changer for Pearson was, “having data and being able to use it;” meaning that they used Onit data in conjunction with their Tableau business intelligence tool for advanced reporting.

Amanda continued by providing a highly detailed demo of their Onit contract lifecycle management system. We hope you’ll take some time view this highly informative webinar by clicking the link below.

Watch the recorded webinar here and sign up to learn more about the Lean Into Legal Ops initiative.

Highlights from Legalweek 2020: Trends, Technology and Networking

Posted on February 17, 2020 by - Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

After much anticipation, the Legalweek Conference was back this year from February 4th to the 6th at the Hilton Midtown hotel in New York. After three packed days at the world’s largest and longest-running trade show for legal technology, one question remains: was it worth it, and should we be looking forward to next year? Let’s recap.
 

There were hundreds of exhibitors, dozens of workshops, and numerous speakers in the Hilton Midtown conference center. Every exhibitor brought amazing legal technology products and services and even had onsite demonstrations, including Onit. Our live demonstration of our enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management software drew excellent crowds and sparked amazing conversations with countless industry professionals.

If you attended, you probably got a glimpse of our Mardi Gras parade on February 4th that led attendees to our happy hour located at the Dream Hotel.

Networking with the attendees provided us valuable insight into how the market was changing and adapting to new technologies such as AI. It is clear that most organizations and vendors are making the push towards incorporating AI technologies into their legal operations, which raised many questions and opinions on the best strategy for implementing and utilizing AI across not only legal but the entire enterprise. The Legalweek Conference also went far beyond just casual networking on the exhibit floor. There were countless sponsored happy hours including Onit’s Mardi Gras Happy Hour and exclusive in-house legal leaders’ dinner! I can guarantee that more business transactions took place during those private events than anywhere else.

But more importantly, the Legalweek Conference had a wealth of different sessions, speakers, and workshops. Onit’s own Account Manager Paige Edwards moderated the session, “Career Up! LegalOps for eDiscovery Professionals & Tech Wonky Attorneys” which was an enlightening discussion between Prudential, Toyota, and Purdue Pharma, that received an incredible turnout. There was also a keynote from blockchain and emerging technology researcher Bettina Warburg, co-founder and managing partner, Warburg Serress Investments and Animal Ventures, where she provided valuable insight into the future of blockchain technology within the legal industry.

So, should you be looking forward to attending Legalweek in 2021? Definitely! We cannot wait to see what new and exciting events, vendors, speakers, and knowledge next year will bring us.

5 Common Challenges Facing Contract Lifecycle Management: How to Overcome Them

Posted on December 11, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation

Businesses that implement a seamless contract lifecycle management (CLM) process compress their time to revenue, mitigate risks by having fewer contractual exceptions and increase customer satisfaction. But managing the lifecycle of a contract – from request and creation, review and approval, to execution and renewal — involves a lot of departments, and those departments often don’t have access to the same systems. But there are other hurdles to overcome, such as these five common contract lifecycle management challenges:

  1. Speed vs. Control
    The biggest source of friction in the contract lifecycle comes from the balancing act between speed and control. Because contracts are so critical, legal’s preference is to examine contracts in extreme detail. Sales often has a different interest, pressuring legal to get out of the way so deals can close faster. The main business challenge becomes moving contracts through quickly but with enough oversight to effectively manage company risk.
  2. Lack of Visibility
    Part of what exacerbates the speed vs. control dilemma for legal is a general lack of visibility into contract terms, obligations and value. If you can’t see it, you can’t control it. This becomes a major pain point because agreements outline the terms of the value exchanged, and if you can’t ensure you are getting the right value for your deals, money is slipping through your company’s fingers. Lack of visibility is an especially serious problem for expiring contracts and renewals.
  3. Inconsistent Legal Language
    It’s important to be consistent in the use of terms and language in your contracts. Gaps in standardized language can introduce risk or confusion. If you can’t determine if your contracts contain accurate language, or what is different between contracts, lawyers might have to get involved in every single deal. This is not only inefficient but also increases the risk of being non-compliant or leaving revenue on the table.
  4. Information Silos and Manual Processes
    Managing all of the necessary steps in your contract process is hard enough internally across several departments. The complexity of managing contracts increases exponentially when you have to manage contracts across several office locations, time zones or languages. The ability to have everything centrally located with changes tracked in real time becomes critical. Human error, bottlenecked contract cycles and limited process control can increase risk dramatically when contracts are managed manually. Automating contract management helps companies improve control and visibility and significantly shortens contract creation time.
  5. Inability to Manage Changes
    It’s important to have a mechanism for managing changes over time. You need to be up to speed on renewal dates, pricing changes, emerging legal requirements and other events that will require you to speak to your customer/vendor specifically about your contractual relationship. Your ability to manage the contract, particularly changes over time and the renewal process, will have a direct impact on your customer retention rate.

So what can we do to meet these contract lifecycle management challenges head-on and with limited resources? You guessed it: technology is the clear winner in this category. The profound impact of technology on CLM is gaining momentum globally as more companies are realizing its extensive benefits as a business value driver. These cloud-based solutions offer painless integration, user-friendly interfaces, increased workflow and reduced costs across the board. Collaboration in handling projects is becoming more prevalent and sought-after, and CLM software companies have responded in kind by injecting more collaborative functionality into their products, another benefit of the SaaS model.

The best CLM solutions offer an array of features and benefits to fit organizations of all sizes and needs. A contract lifecycle management solution should offer complete control and visibility of your customer contracts, in all stages from review to approval to execution to renewal. The best CLM solutions simplify the submission, review, approval and management of contracts in one easy to use tool. Team members should never have to search their inbox or hard drive for the latest version or keep an Excel spreadsheet to manage their contracts. Powerful business analytics and reporting engines are additional hallmarks of the best CLM solutions, and are crucial in helping team members with their reporting, configuring notifications and other tasks.

Another important consideration in the value of CLM is how high the cost of non-compliance with regulations can be, and CLM is well-prepared to assist with this. Efficiency and transparency in reporting is another much-welcomed feature of these solutions, as well as the ability to flag possible problematic contracts before they reach the execution stage. Collaboration is a key ingredient in any operation involving many people, and contract management is a good example. Oftentimes, solution providers miss the mark (or ignore it altogether) on collaboration ability in their software. The interaction of multiple stakeholders such as legal professionals, attorneys and accountants requires that the CLM solution enable and encourage collaboration from inside and outside of the organization. Team members are then able to leverage knowledge from one another, and in turn be more productive and conserve the amount of time spent on projects.

If you’d like to see a demo of Onit CLM, click here.

CLM Management Software: Is Yours Driving Business Value?

Posted on December 4, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation

The rising need to reduce, eliminate, or mitigate risks related to legality, financing, and procurement is driving the contract lifecycle management (CLM) market growth. Additionally, CLM software allows users to maintain documentation related to pricing, dates, and information regarding internal & external entities involved and signatories. The growing demand for a central repository for efficient contract lifecycle management software among enterprises across various sectors is proliferating CLM market growth. The profound impact of technology on how contracts are managed is gaining momentum globally as more companies are realizing its extensive benefits as a business value driver.

We need a CLM solution that goes far beyond the basic necessities. We need a solution that offers a number of ways to drive business value. CLM should help organizations maximize the value from their core contract assets. In our new white paper, A Roadmap to Evaluating Contract Lifecycle Management Technology, we offer some useful insights about:

  • CLM Market Trends
  • Sources of Business Value
  • Features and Benefits of the Best CLM Solutions

The market for best of breed contract lifecycle management solutions has grown significantly in recent years and all signs indicate that this momentum will only increase in magnitude in the near and long term. Companies now expect more than just the basics in a CLM solution; they want a system that not only handles all the workflows involved in contract management, but also a solution that drives business value. Learn how to identify the most important business value drivers to look for in a contract lifecycle management solution in our white paper.

Download our new white paper, A Roadmap to Evaluating Contract Lifecycle Management Technology.

Driving Disruption in the Legal Department Part III: What’s Ahead for Legal Operations

Posted on September 11, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

In part II of this blog series we discussed the joining of forces of legal operations and technology. Technology has been a key player in the unprecedented growth of legal operations in recent years, and this relationship will continue growing even faster. Now it’s time to reveal what some experts have to say about the future of legal ops.

To set the stage for what the future holds, it’s best to see the current lay of the land in legal operations. There have been some major disruptions in the legal sector in the past decade, one of which is advancements in technology. Some external and internal drivers of change have been the rising cost of legal services, the strategy of doing more with less, globalization, mergers and acquisitions, and advancements in cutting-edge technologies1.

Onit’s CEO Eric M. Elfman and Nathan Wenzel, General Manager and Co-founder of SimpleLegal have each spent almost three decades in disciplines that are now known as legal operations. Based on their experiences, these thought leaders foresee continued growth in legal ops, with legal operations professionals moving well past matter management, spend management, and the selection of counsel and evolving into more strategic roles. Here are their seven predictions for the future of legal operations:

  1. Legal operations professionals will continue to take on administrative burdens – in far more areas than spend management – in order to let lawyers be lawyers.
  2. Law departments will work to untangle overcomplexity in their enterprise legal management systems and return to basics that allow work to be done more efficiently and effectively.
  3. The use of collaboration and workflow tools will continue to grow as the legal function becomes more global and complex.
  4. More will be expected of technology vendors, and law departments will less frequently integrate a variety of tools and instead build platforms that handle multiple functions seamlessly.
  5. Legal ops professionals will engage more closely and directly with their companies’ businesses units, with a heightened focus on turn time and customer satisfaction.
  6. Law departments will build expertise to match the pricing experts that have become commonplace in law firms. Firms currently have the advantage in negotiations and AFAs because they understand the data better; legal ops will look to even the playing field.
  7. Legal operations professionals – and in-house counsel – must get better at data and analytics in order to make better decisions to behave more like business units while also better serving their clients.

Advancements in technology, process-driven service delivery and evolving and segmented roles in operations will be spearheading the future of legal operations for many years to come. The most proactive legal departments have already recognized this and are taking control of their future by taking action now.

Click here to read the white paper, Driving Disruption in the Law Department.

1 The legal department of the future: How disruptive trends are creating a new business model for in-house counsel. Deloitte, 2018.

Driving Disruption in the Legal Department Part I: The Rapid Evolution of Legal Operations

Posted on August 27, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

The pressure to run the legal department like a business has been gaining traction for several years. Driving efficiencies and containing costs are two key reasons that legal operations is important and is growing so quickly. In addition, law departments were forced to adopt a more operationally focused mindset as a result of the Great Recession. The 2008 downturn was so severe, and efficiency and cost-cutting were considered so critical to the survival of the business at large, that the balloon popped. And since it has, C-suites have increasingly been making their law departments behave more like their other business units. This ultimately led to the rise of a profession dedicated to bringing business discipline to the law department: legal operations.

Legal operations professionals handle the management of vendors, systems, strategic planning, technology, knowledge, financial issues and the myriad other tasks that can overwhelm the legal department. Legal operations is all about optimizing the legal department’s ability to help grow the company, and is a multi-disciplinary function that optimizes legal services delivery to a business or government entity by focusing on twelve core competencies. The competencies, developed by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), are divided among three levels: foundational, advanced and mature. Almost every legal department function is covered, including vendor management, technology and process support, service delivery and litigation support.

Legal operations professionals are now managing outside vendors, implementing technology, overall legal spend and many other aspects of the legal department. And it’s not only happening in the Fortune 500 companies (as it was a few years ago); smaller companies are getting aboard as well. We believe that legal operations will be responsible for some of the biggest changes in the legal ecosystem in years to come.

Click here to download the full white paper, “Driving Disruption in the Law Department”

The Lean, Mean Legal Department Part II: Technology to the Rescue

Posted on August 13, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Cost control and cost management have, and continue to be, among the biggest challenges of legal departments around the globe. How have legal departments been handling this? By increasing the workload of existing resources, bringing on more in-house lawyers, and implementing more technology. Increasing the workload? Something employees definitely don’t want to hear. Hiring more in-house lawyers? That’s not really making things “leaner,” is it? That leaves us with technology. Let’s investigate this option a little more by first referring to HBR Consulting’s 2018 Law Department Survey:

“Law departments also continue in their efforts to streamline operations, not only to control costs but also continue to increase efficiency. Legal technology continues to be a focus of many departments and plan implementation of next generation technologies to increase productivity. Law departments continue to be interested in data-related technologies, with 28 percent indicating they plan to implement artificial intelligence technology in the next one to two years, and 26 percent planning to implement legal spend analytics. These were topped, however, by contract management solutions, which 29 percent plan to implement in the next one to two years. These new legal technologies help automate manual workflows and create visibility into workload and spending, allowing organizations to improve operating efficiency and facilitate decision making.”

E-billing, matter management, legal holds and contract management top the list of most implemented legal technology, but there are many others. Interestingly, the top two areas where customers are moving out of their existing deficient systems are e-billing and matter management. This points to an even greater demand for those cutting-edge companies who provide the crème de la crème of legal technology solutions.

Why has it taken so long for some legal departments to see the light and get on board with technology? Understandably, a lean budget is often cited as one of the major reasons for not implementing legal technology. Resistance to change is another common reason. But one of the other major reasons is a reluctance to integrate new technology with existing systems. Here’s a little secret: resistance to change is really the only thing that should be holding up progress – the other issues of budget and integration have changed considerably in favor of organizations seeking new technology. There are technology solutions out there for practically every budget, and integrations are much more seamless than in the past. Gaining the support of leadership is a big step toward solving the resistance to change. Stop dreading the phrase, “do more with less.” Instead, we challenge you to thrive on it and explore the technology solutions out there that will truly help you do more with less.

Read our white paper, “Doing More with Less: How Technology is Optimizing Legal.”